Category Archives: fandom

It’s Femslash February and I’ve been writing Jean/Hilda and Sam/Susan all month which has returned me to the perennial question of why there is not more romances (fanfic or profic) in the world featuring a central relationship between two female-identified persons. There are a lot of women writing professionally published romance and romance-centered fanfiction, and there are a lot of queer women writing it. Published romance featuring m/m relationships is a booming category (I read and enjoy a lot of it!) and “slash” is so synonymous in the fandom hivemind with male/male pairings that “femslash” carries the mark of difference: this isn’t regular slash (featuring men sexing) but femslash (featuring ladysex).

Women — especially queer women — writing romance know full well that women can fall in love with, and have smoking hot sex with other women. Many of us have done so! But “the market isn’t there” for f/f stories the way it is for m/m or f/m (or even f/m/m). Last night I read an interview with romance writer Cat Sebastian where she and the interviewer, Kelly Faircloth, have the following exchange about why we aren’t drowing in historical femslash a la the classic Sarah Waters’ novels Tipping the Velvetand Fingersmith:

There’s such a large audience of women for romance featuring two men. What do you think it is that readers see in that?

I don’t know, and I think about this all the time! First of all, I don’t know that there is an answer that we can access. This is just me guessing. I do wonder if it’s something about seeing a man through the male gaze. Maybe we are used to seeing women through the male gaze. Maybe the experience of seeing men as beings who are desired by other men is freeing, or novel, or attractive in some other way as readers. I feel like that could be it, and that might explain why F/F doesn’t seem to have taken root, which is a huge source of frustration for me. I don’t understand—where are all my lesbian historical novels? Give them to me! There aren’t nearly enough of them out there, and everybody who’s written one assured me that the reason is because there’s just not a huge audience, and they like to eat food and make money, which is totally respectable. Maybe it’s because in a novel with two women as protagonists, maybe as readers, we don’t know how to look at them without the male gaze. I have no idea, and it’s been so long since I have been in a women’s studies class, but I do feel like that’s got to be part if it.

I don’t know! I would like for somebody to write a dissertation on that.

I also don’t understand. Like, Fingersmith is one of the best books ever.

Exactly. One of the best books ever. I feel like romance needs to jealousy claim Sarah Waters as one of our own, because Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet are models we could use.

Also, if you look at how people could hide queer relationships around existing structures—two women could live together really easily in the 19th century.

Yes! And forever. It’s never been hard to hide a lesbian relationship. And I don’t know if that’s because we expect women to live together, or we expect single women to team up, or if it’s just because no one’s thinking there’s anything sexual behind it, so they can do whatever they want. Even if they’re married to other people, they can do whatever they want, and no one looks twice.

As Cat observes, there’s a widespread agreement that “there’s just not a huge audience,” and yet there are also perennial discussions by the (mostly female/nonbinary and many queer) people who read/write romance and read/write romantic fanfic about how we all wish there were more. I actually began writing fanfic and publishing it on Ao3 in 2011 specifically because I was frustrated by the lack of f/f representation in erotic fanworks. Writing m/m came later, although these days I have about an equal number of m/m, f/f, m/f and more complex (e.g. m/m/f or f/f + m/f + m/m) relationships represented in my overall body of work. I have felt the pull first-hand, as both a (queer cis woman) writer and a reader, toward m/m story arcs and pondered how to square the desire to read, write, and imagine those relationships with my real-life f/f marriage and my feminist values which call upon me to center marginalized voices in narrative storytelling.

So here’s my attempt to share my working theory for why f/f romance isn’t an exploding subgenre, and why Femslash February is a thing because the rest of the year femslash is such a rare flower in the ecosphere of fandom. This is in no way meant to be a definitive articulation of why f/f is so difficult to locate in our bodies of literature, and if anyone who reads this has additional insight I welcome your thoughts below or on Twitter (@feministlib).

Reason 1: Men are protagonists.

It’s widely recognized across genres that in the stories available to us in Western literature, (white) male characters are understood to be capable of carrying a “universal” narrative while female protagonists are not. Women and girls, queer or not, learn from a very young age to identify and empathize with male characters in stories across multiple formats (television, film, literature). Men and boys are presumed to need characters like themselves to remain interested in the media before them. I don’t believe this is innately true about men and boys — because I believe that women, men, and nonbinary persons share a common humanity that allows us to empathize and be interested in the humanity of one another across categories of gender, race, sexual orientation, and other differences. However, I do believe that it is a groomed preference: That women (and people from other marginalized identities) are expected, and therefore learn, to identify with characters across identity categories while men are not, and therefore do not — unless they are purposeful about cultivating that ability. It’s not a muscle they are challenged to use — while women are challenged to use it continually.

Therefore, it makes sense that even in a genre dominated by female creators, we drift toward narrative scripts that privilege male subjectivity. That means stories that include male protagonists, either in m/f or m/m relationships, feel more natural to create and consume because we are used to male agency.

This default of the male protagonist can be amplified in fanworks particularly because fanworks play with existing media that is — because patriarchy — skewed heavily toward (white) male protagonists. While fanworks creators have done incredible work queering those canonical protagonists — including, at times, imagining them as genderfluid or trans, or genderswapping one or both characters in what would canonically be an m/m relationship — it remains a factor that canonical main characters are overwhelmingly presented as cis, straight, and male.

Reason 2: Sex Needs Dicks.

Our cultural scripts for sex are overwhelmingly heteronormative and require the presence of a penis for “sex” to have taken place. I would argue that m/m narratives, rightly or wrongly, are easier to translate in the context of these narratives because putting a penis into an orifice counts as sex in our brains in a way that sex only with clitorises does not. We also expect men to be sexually-desiring beings, and physically sexual, in a way we do not expect of women. (Again, even queer women are vulnerable to these sexual scripts because we grow up in heteronormative culture too.) In the context of the romance genre, there is typically a romantic and sexual script that intensifies over the course of the novel and culiminates — for f/m couples — with penis-in-vagina intercourse as an expression of consumated love and/or marriage. This script can be hijacked for use with m/m protagonists because you can build the sexual intimacy from handjobs to blowjobs to anal sex with kissing thrown in somewhere along the intimacy ladder depending on whether you assume that kissing is the entry point for sexual contact or a feminine-coded expression of love (meaning it falls probably somewhere after blowjobs).

What do you do with two women? We don’t have a widespread, culturally legible or adaptive script for that. Which leads to jokes like this:

(Image: Imagined graph of Hetero Sex vs. Lesbian Sex. The hetero sex graph is a four-minute timeline featuring a male orgasm, an optional female orgasm, then sleep. The lesbian sex graph is a five-hour timeline featuring a rainbow tangle of sexual activity and multiple orgasms. I don’t have an image credit for this, so if you know who to credit please let me know!)

Despite the fact that f/f couples report higher rates of orgasm and higher levels of sexual satisfaction than women who have sex with men, we don’t know how to turn our queer sexual pleasure into a linear narrative (possibly because of that “time travel” squiggle around hour three…). In a genre that relies to some extent on a predictable, comfortable formula that promises readers the emotional satisfaction of increasing emotional and sexual intimacy that culminates in the formation of a committeed, found family relationship, those squiggles don’t provide clear guidence for how to move your two female protagonists from first blush to final orgasm and/or family formation.

Reason 3: Challenging Toxic Masculinity

In a world where toxic masculinity runs rampant, f/m and m/m romance (fanfic or professionally published) is a space where feminist-minded women and nonbinary folks can explore what the world might be like if men, too, were allowed to be vulnerable and desired. In romance literature and fanfic romance, male partners feel a full range of emotions related to forming human relationships: desire, pleasure, anxiety, hurt, anger, fear, pride, caring … the list could go on and on. In order for a romance plot to work, the male protagonist(s) must be a character the reader can identify with as a human being whose humanity could be made more whole in relationship with his partner — and often in relationship with extended and found family too. Romance novels assert that men can be desiring and desired, and that their sexuality is not irrevocably shaped by expectations of dominance or violence. I think this reason is part of what Cat Sebastian was getting at in the interview excerpt above, where she observed that “seeing men as beings who are desired by other men is freeing.”

As Emma Lindsay observed a year ago, dating men can make women feel like shit in part because “society labels men creepy when they are open about their sexual feelings.” Yes in order for f/m or m/m romance narratives to work, male characters must be open about their sexual feelings. A three hundred page novel centered around a man and a woman, or a man and another man, falling in love and becoming sexually intimate requires interiority and emotional labor from both protagonists in order to give the readers stake in the happily-ever-after outcome. We need to care that they care. We need to be shown that they are. Or the emotional payoff of reading the novel simply isn’t there. And because of this genre requirement, we get three-dimensional human characters who wrestle with their humanity, wrestle with their desires, and wrestle with the cultural scripts they have been handed and emerge better human beings.

This is cathartic and hopeful reading, and writing, for people who yearn for a less toxic, less patriarchal world. And it’s an act of revisioning that f/f romances don’t tackle in such a direct way (although they also must reckon with toxic masculinity, as I point out below).

Reason 4: The Shadow of Male Violence

(Image: Still from the film Carol in which Carol and Therese are interrupted at breakfast by a private investigator posing as a salesman.)

For a number of reasons this year I’ve been thinking a lot about the spectre of male violence that haunts romance between women. I’m not sure if this is so much a reason that f/f stories are not created as it is an illustration of how deeply our patriarchal narratives of romance and sex require a male presence — so much so that when we try to write them out of the narrative they become violent. In the 2015 film Carol — an adaptation of the classic lesbian pulp The Price of Salt— the two women whose romance is the central narrative, Carol and Therese, escape Carol’s estranged husband and Therese’s (nominal) boyfriend by embarking upon a roadtrip from New York to Chicago. Carol’s husband, furious at his wife’s request for a divorce — and eager to collect evidence of her perversity as leverage in the custody dispute over their young daughter — sends a private investigator to tail them. In a striking violation of the couple’s private intimacies, he ultimately ends up making an audio recording of the couple’s first sexual encounter together.

There is something heady (for me, as a cis, bisexual woman) in the realization that you can opt out of the social expectation that you give a damn what men think of you: your body, your words, your desires, your life choices, your past, or your future. Men are powerful in our patriarchal society — granted, it is power that comes with caveats regarding race, class, sexual orientation, and all the rest — and girls grow up into women understanding that they will be scrutinized by men and that this scrutiny will matter. If you are a woman who desires men (and I have been that woman, in the past) the reality of navigating patriarchal power within the intimacies of your most intense and enduring adult relationship(s) can feel like an exhausting prospect. For women who also or instead desire women, it can be liberatory to realize that the male gaze no longer matters to you. It might constrain your choices in the wider world, but it is unable to touch you in the bedroom.

As I say, I experienced this as liberatory. Yet it is also dangerous. Since I have been paying attention to this spectre of male violence in the context of f/f romance I have seen it everywhere: In Cat Sebastian’s The Soldier’s Scoundrelthe sister of one of the male protagonists, Charlotte, is trapped in an abusive marriage and escapes only when her lover, Anne, murders her husband. In Jordan Hawk’s Undertowa spurned male suitor not only attempts to murder Maggie’s ketoi lover Persephone but attempts genocide against Persephone’s entire species. Women are vulnerable under patriarchy whether or not they choose to have sex with men, and men who feel entitled to female attention can turn violent when they realize they have been written out of the plot. That’s an exhausting truth we live with daily, and it can be hard to read and write it in our escapist literature as well.

Reason 5: Follow the Money

Of course, at the end of the day, women — queer women, especially — do write and read f/f romance, and yearn for more. But as with any other lack of diversity in publishing, authors need editors and publishers convinced of a book’s marketability before they will give meaningful support to a project. This is why, I would argue, that we see f/f relationships written in to more and more m/m and f/m romance series as novellas or as secondary couples. Queer women — including myself — who write m/m relationships as the primary story arc will populate their world with secondary queer characters that feel authentic to our experiences. The m/m or f/m romance carries the narrative for all of the reasons outlined above, while the women-loving-women do so on the sidelines — often with the full support of their gay male or otherwise socially subversive protagonists.

Hopefully, in the not-to-distant future, we’ll see those relationships rotated with increasing regularity from the sidelines to center court. More and more frequently we are seeing f/f novels integrated into romance series with m/f and m/m pairings: Her Ebonyby Maggie Chase (2017); Star Crossedby Emma Barry & Genevieve Turner (2017); and the forthcoming Last Couple in Hellby K. J. Charles (March 2018!) which I am dying to get my hands on.

Earlier this month I set up a Good Reads shelf on which I am collecting all of the f/f historical romances I come across. If you have a favorite f/f historical — or come across one in your reading life — please share! I dearly hope that one day there will be too many f/f romance novels published for me to keep up with the flood.

This is an addendum to last night’s post fueled by the conversation I had with Hanna on our walk to work (which, more often than not, constitutes gossip about fanfic).

One of the defining features of fanfic as a genre, for me, is that it is character-driven. Fic, the way I read and write it, is primarily about individual characters and their relationships (erotic or platonic) with other characters. It’s not about establishing the rules of the universe or about the suspense of the plot. It’s about asking “What would these individuals do if they were presented with X situation?” either in canon, in the canon ‘verse, or in a completely different setting (an alternate universe or AU).

I would actually argue that most if not all characters are independent of the authors who write about them. I struggle with the idea of characters as the intellectual property of an originating author. I feel like characters develop independent lives, such that they are bigger than one single author’s interpretation of those characters. We collectively narrate pieces of their existence. They become more real, in cultural terms, the more people tell stories about them in different iterations.

So this is another reason why I can come to fanfic that considers characters that I never met before in the source material. The fanwork becomes, for me, that first encounter, that source material. In some cases, I end up reading backwards to the “original” source material because I’m interested in that dialog between fic and canon. Other times, all I care about is the intra-fanwork conversation, the characters as collectively presented in the body of writing considered to be fannish vs. canon (however we define that). It’s about falling in love with the characters, for me, and becoming invested in the characters. And I can get to know those characters through a million shards of fic almost more intimately than I can get to know them through the singular voice of a specific published author or the narrative constraints of a television series or film. Continue reading →

This blog post is written in direct response to the latest episode of the Fansplaining podcast, “One True Fandom” (episode eight), the transcript of which I read this afternoon. I had some thoughts about the conversation which I shared briefly on Twitter and wanted to expand them into a post.

Here’s what I wrote on Twitter:

I write #fanfic for stuff I can easily riff off, and for stuff that irritates me because I think it could be better … @fansplaining

I was introduced to fanfiction as a genre— a genre that resonated with my own “homegrown” approach to fictional narratives (more below) — rather than coming to it through a particular fannish community. My now-wife was the one who introduced me to the language and conventions of fic, specifically slash, because she thought I would be interested in slash fiction as a form or cultural critique and also countercultural / queer erotica. I mean, it was also a wildly successful form of nerd-flirting. But I think my introduction to the activity of fanfiction as an idea rather than as a form of participation in a specific fandom continues to shape my relationship to the practice — and to fandom culture more generally.

I love fanfiction as a genre in part because it’s a language to describe how I have approached fictional narratives throughout my life. Some of my earliest memories from childhood involve spinning out narrative “what if…” tales about my favorite fictional characters. Oftentimes with rampant self-insertion. As a teenager, one of my favorite category of narrative was retellings of folk- and fairytales, or mythologies from various cultures. I collected, and wrote, multiple versions of certain tales, reworking, updating, critiquing classic interpretations. Think Beautyand Rose Daughter by Robin McKinley, Tam Linby Pamela Dean, Wickedby Gregory Maguire. When I was fourteen I wrote a 200-page adaptation of the Cinderella tale on a DOS word processing program. So when I was in my late twenties and someone said “here is this thing called fanfiction and this is how it works…” I was like Oh, yes. That. Why didn’t anyone tell me about this earlier?!

I read fanfiction for canon narratives with which I have zero or passing familiarity.Gundam Wing. Teen Wolf. Daredevil. I’ve never seen them. Hawaii 5-0. One episode, only well after I read widely in the Steve/Danny pairing. To me, fanfiction is both critique of (or elaboration on) the specific source material and also a broader response to popular culture. It offers up new ways of seeing what are, often, very tired stories. And stories that I as a queer, feminist-minded woman struggle to relate to. Fanfiction is a restful genre for me in many ways. I know I can come to it for queer intervention. For feminist intervention. Increasingly for intersectionality in its exploration of issues like racial inequality and dis/ability. While there are published authors whose work share these features with fic, as a genre fic has delivered most reliably in these ways. So my ability to access, and take pleasure in reading, fic is only loosely related to specific canonical ‘verses.

Upon further investigation, it became clear that Ebooks Tree is not hosting MOBI files of AO3 works, but linking directly to the versions hosted on the AO3 servers, and we do not currently believe they are hosting PDF files, either. The AO3 team has taken action to prevent anyone from downloading works if they were following the links provided by Ebooks Tree.

I’d say my advice below stands regarding use of the Ebooks Tree website: Why use their database if you can get a complete series of fanworks in multiple file types directly from AO3 … for free and without creating a user account?

~A.

Original Post 13 April 2015 19:34:14. It came to my attention this afternoon that the website Ebooks Tree (about which there is no “about” page) has been scraping content from Archive of Our Own and posting it in ebook format without the permission of the AO3 authors or the Organization of Transformative Works.

Five of my fanworks have apparently been scraped and added to the Ebooks Tree database. This was done without my knowledge or permission. I will probably end up writing the site and requesting a takedown of my works. [Update: I have sent the first request as of 8:32pm 4/13/15.] In the meantime, I’d like to point out that Ebooks Tree requires you to create a user account in order to access the works they scraped from my AO3 page … but my fanfiction on AO3 is freely accessible to anyone who wishes to read it, whether or not they have an account with AO3.

So, you know, rather than using a shadowy content provider that’s acquiring shit without asking first and then requiring people to create accounts with them to access it, consider visiting the beautiful AO3 interface and reading or downloading my (and others’!) work in a variety of electronic formats: PDF, MOBI, EPUB, HTML.

For ease of access, here are the works that Ebooks Tree has lifted for their content database:

Also, I gotta say … if you’re gonna steal works — dude, at least do some quality checking! All of these pieces are part of larger series, and the harvester ‘bot totally missed some of my more delicious works. So honestly? They should hire better robots.

I think shipping kicks my creativity into gear in part because it pushes my political buttons as a bisexual woman and as a feminist: I experience shipping as a direct intervention in mainstream narratives. It is a form of critically interacting with books, movies, television series that depict human sexuality and human relationships in certain ways, challenging the stereotypes, assumptions, or erasures I see there and re-working the source within the fanwork to tell a different version of events.

This is going to sound like a weird comparison, but I once attended a talk by Jane Yolan on faith and writing, in which she talked about how some people viewed writing from a Christian perspective as a negative constraint on creativity — but instead she saw it as a limitation that fueled creativity because it gave you a framework that you had to work with … creatively.

I think fan fiction can work in a similar way to writing “Christian fiction” … in that you have a starting set of assumptions (the canon work) that’s sort of there as a de facto set of prompts. And then whatever inspiration you have for your work, you’ll have to be clever enough to put those two things together. Fitting form (the original material) with function (your particular vision in this instance). It’s a challenge that I think can actually amp up someone’s creative juices, because you can’t afford to be lazy about it. (If nothing else, your fellow fans will call you on it!)

How does viewing fanworks by others enhance your creativity?

God, I love the creativity of my fellow fan creators. I’m constantly awed by the dedication with which so many of us write/draw/paint/edit/enact/etc. It’s wonderful to take in so many visions of the same core material; to see how many ways the same narrative(s) can be improvised upon when humans put their minds to it. I definitely feel that my exposure to fanworks and the people who created them has taught me to look at the world in a more multi-faceted way. I see everything through “slash goggles” now, a perspective that necessarily involves holding more than one understanding of a work in mind (and heart) simultaneously.

Fellow writers have also taught me a LOT about the construction of effective erotica; I do believe I have a strong original voice in that regard, but I’m not going to kid myself into thinking I spontaneously learned how to write smut well. I learned it from my fellow fic-writers (thank you!).

What are you able to do creatively with shipping and fanworks that you cannot do with “original” creative works?

I’ve always been a person who thinks best “aloud,” in dialogue with others. With shipping (and fan fiction writing) that conversation is a built-in feature of the activity from the start: you’re in dialogue with the original work that inspired the fan work! I get incredible satisfaction out of participating in that conversation; it generally brings me into a much closer and more positive relationship with the original work (even when I’m highly critical of it) than I would be as a more passive consumer of the original work. I have very little experience with non-transformative fictional work (my non-transformative writing has been in the genres of academic/scholarly papers and creative nonfiction essays / blogging — also forms of conversation in their own right!). But I have tried my hand, occasionally, at non-transformative fiction and I often run out of steam at some point, I don’t have the social accountability to finish the story that the fandom provides. I think I also felt less of a sense of purpose with non-transformative work (it feels less politicized, less like an intervention, which are key kicks-in-the-ass for me as a writer).

What is your response to the idea that those with creative inclinations should work from their own characters and worlds rather than appropriating another’s?

I understand the concern of creators who feel threatened by fan works. At first blush, fan works can look like an authorial power-grab, like plagiarism. However, I’d encourage people who are framing fan creations as plagiarism to reconsider that assumption. Instead, I’d argue that fan works are a form of reader/viewer response to the original piece. Like literary or film criticism, they are responsive to the original work, cannot exist (are often meaningless) without that original work with which they are interacting — usually with a mix of praise and critique.

As long as the pieces are clearly framed as such (transformative works by fans), and the creators are not making money from their creations or passing their work off as actually by the original creator(s), I would argue that original creators can only benefit from the fan community getting excited about their creation enough to generate those responses. That responsive interaction will likely translate into investment in your original creation, which — if you’re a professional of any kind — is going to translate into a larger audience, higher profile, more income. As a fan creator myself, I’ll be honest and say that at least half of the original creations I create for I would not be reading or watching if I were not invested in creating fan works from them. The fan creation IS my investment in the work, my conversation with it.

Finally, as an historian I would point to the fact that fan works have a long history, as does the tradition of artistic inspiration, musical “quotation,” fashion trends, and other conventions of one original work informing another very directly. While the Internet and other technologies have made this type of interaction more visible, I would argue it has long been a part of the equation in creative economies. This does not mean that creative rights concerns are invalid — in fact, they are crucial to continue defining and advocating for — but it does mean that there is precedent for original works and transformative works living side-by-side in mutual benefit.

Is there anything about shipping, or the shipping community, that limits you as an artist, creator, or consumer?Well, I don’t think this is exactly the kind of “limit” you’re looking for, but I have sometimes found myself as frustrated by the tropes of certain fandoms, and the imbalance of having an endless supply of fic along certain themes, for certain fandoms, and then radio silence along other lines, in other fandoms. Obviously people are inspired to write what they’re inspired to write. But fan works, like original works, are not created in a vacuum. So I think it’s legitimate to note that there are relatively few sexually explicit fan works featuring female couples (compared with the huge pool of m/m slash out there). This can be a self-perpetuating cycle as fan communities reinforce excitement over certain pairings and fans who create in collaboration or through inspiration from one another gather around certain fandoms or pairings and not others.

I will include myself in this indictment: I write both female and male pairings, but in latter days I’ve been working on male pairings in part because that’s where the community reinforcement comes from. My two Supernatural fics have far and away the most views, kudos, and comments on AO3 of all my fic. The next-highest story in terms of exposure and praise is a female pairing for Downton Abbey that’s been up for almost two years, and is still only half the views as the Supernatural piece that’s been up for five months.

So I think that even though the fan community often pushes back against canon, and the limitations of mainstream media in terms of human sexual diversity and other types of diversity, they are still often constrained by the “givens” of particular fandoms, and by the pressures of “the market” — even though it’s not a financial economy, but more of a social economy.

And, you know, we’re human. So to the extent the culture we are steeped in perpetuates racism, sexism, classism, abelism, ageism, etc., etc., etc., as creators/consumers we’re going to fall into those limiting traps as well, from time to time.

How would you characterize the community surrounding fanworks? (If you have also created non-fan creative works, can you compare the two communities? Those who read/consume are also welcome to compare the two communities.)

Overall, incredibly positive. These are people who take pleasure in what they do, and who generally engage in the activity as a leisure-time activity, as something fun and joyful. I really appreciate that fan creators are amateurs (“lovers”) of their craft.

For myself, the pleasure I get from participation in the fanwork community is enhanced by the fact that my creative expression here is option, is non-professional, is what I do for pleasure rather than for work. I am also creative (even writing-creative!) in my professional life, and that feels more deadline driven and like it has a higher risk level to it than in the fanwork community. I feel more alone and (potentially) judged, like there is a much narrower margin for error in that context.

My fan creations are lower risk because they can be revised and updated as want them to be, and I find my audience to be incredibly supportive and forgiving. Fans are pretty good with the constructive part of constructive criticism — they WANT your work to succeed, and get better, at what it’s trying to do. It’s rather like blogging, in that respect, only with no trolls! Which is lovely.

And I don’t want it to sound like I haven’t had incredibly warm and supportive feedback from my mentors in the professional settings I move in, either — they’ve been unbeatable! But the stakes there just feel bigger in terms of being taken seriously as a ______. Fans will pretty much take you seriously as a fan as long as you’re enjoying yourself and the object of your fannish love.

I would say particular fandoms strike me (in my early 30s) as “young” by comparison … but that varies really a lot by fandom, so it’s not a generalization.

Fan fiction authors also seem to be majority women, but again that would be a gross a generalization in terms of fan participation in responsive mediums.

What are the major problems you see within and surrounding shipping and fanworks?

I don’t know if I’d characterize any of these as “major problems” but I do see them as … problematic? issues that fans as a community might do well to have conversations about.

1) RPF. Real-person fic is something I have major reservations about, as it feels non-consensual and intrusive to me. There’s a difference between someone choosing to portray themselves (or consenting to have themselves portrayed) in a sexual way, publicly, and to have other people create sexually explicit material about them — even with positive, fannish intent! — and make that public. It feels stalkery and, like I said, majorly non-consensual. I think it’s a kissing cousin of “revenge porn” — where sexually explicit pictures of videos (real or faked) of a person is released to the public as a form of character defamation.

2) Over-identification and emotional investment. This is something I tred carefully on because obviously fans have a long history of being characterized as hysterical, too passionate, etc. (what is too passionate, even, right??). But I have definitely come across people who use fandoms to validate their own identities (like, a character HAS to be gay or they can’t deal, or — conversely — the idea that a character could be read as lesbian freaks them out and pushes them into defensiveness). And I’ve also seen people using fanwork to manage their own trauma or mental health which is totally appropriate alongside getting other forms of help, but I sometimes feel like fanwork is not a replacement for therapy, medication, a social support network, [insert need here].

3) Territorialness. So one of the great things about fans can be our generosity and collaborative spirit. … and one of the worst things about fans can be our sense of ownership of a particular interpretation of a canon piece. To the extent that people sometimes abuse the folks who support “rival” interpretations, and even abuse original creators whose vision differs from their own. It’s one thing to critique a creator’s vision (the direction a series is going, something they do to a character, etc.) … but I also think it’s important to remember that just as WE (the fans) have a right to our vision of the story or character, so do other fans and the original creator.

Anything else you would like to add about shipping as creativity?Whew! I think this form has me beat, so I’m going to leave it at that 🙂 … looking forward to the post!

So having explored fan fiction generally (and why I’m drawn to it) and erotic fan fiction as a sub-genre of fic, and why I think it’s important, I thought I’d round this little series out with some thoughts on what draws me to the particular fandoms and pairings (relationships) I write … and what I’m trying to do when I write them. Besides, you know, enjoy the smut. I’m also going to address, below, a couple of questions I’ve fielded lately about the ethics of fic-writing practice.

Donna Noble (Doctor Who)*

Why write the pairings I write?

Well, so, it’s tempting to say that I write the things I write because I find them compelling and I just do, okay? On a certain level, trying to explain why you find the the fiction you like compelling is like trying to explain why you love your partner. It’s not really reducible to a bullet point list.

But on the other hand, I’m me. So of course I have some Thoughts on the subject. And it starts with the fact that I consumed a lot of erotic fan fiction at a point where I was beginning to actively think about relational sexuality and how sexual identity and desire worked in peoples’ lives (see post two). And I really enjoyed a lot of fan fic I was reading, mostly gay male pairings ’cause those were the fandoms Hanna and I were reading, but I struggled to find sexually-explicit lesbian pairings. And the femslash I did come across was frustratingly in-explicit about sex, or written by people who didn’t seem to fully grasp the possibilities of what two female-bodied people might do together, sexual-intimacy wise. Hetero and gay male sex scenes in fic (and, to be fair, in a lot of regular porn) work on a fairly standard narrative arc that culminates in penetrative sex — penis-in-vagina or anal sex — as The Most Bestest Form of Sexual Intimacy. It’s pretty much always orgasm-producing for both partners and sometimes it’s clear the authors (and the characters they’re writing) don’t consider sex to have happened until there’s been a penis inside a vagina or an anus.

Without a penis, what do you do?! Okay, yes, there are dildos and vibrators, but honestly not a lot of fics wade into the territory of sex toys very skillfully, and dildos in a lesbian sex scene too often just cue the author to assume sex with a dildo is about role playing het sex. Which it can be, but certainly doesn’t have to be. In my opinion, it’s much more fun to start without that penetrative-sex-as-goal model in mind and think about all the ways two bodies might come together (double entendre very much intended).

So I developed a (Queer, Feminist) Agenda. Which was to inject the world with realistic smut about ladybits. Smut that was tactile, visceral, about real bodies coming together and people making meaning out of the sex they were engaged in. And I’m an historian, so I started out pilfering from Downton Abbey, writing an eight-story arc about Sybil Crawley and Gwen. And I went on from there to other female pairings and eventually stuck my toe into the waters of m/m slash. It was kind of terrifying at first, pushing out into writing about men having sex — something I don’t have hands-on experience with. But I discovered that, at least the way I go about it, the characters take hold of the narrative regardless of gender and help me feel my way through giving them positive (and I hope realistic) sexual experiences! And in part, I was motivated by the same (Queer, Feminist) Agenda as I had been with writing female-bodied sex scenes: the be-all and end-all of sex for guys doesn’t have to be penetration.

I’m hardly the first person to observe this, but for people who are queer in some way, writing slash fiction can be a way to revise the heteronormative narratives of mainstream media. And, I’d add as a feminist, it can be a way to revise sexism and other isms as well. Watching a television show with primarily straight relationships and re-writing or filling in those stories to imagine queer relationships injects our experience into the cultural discourse. Characters on television, in film, in books, are assumed straight until explicitly identified as queer; fan fiction more often assumes that everyone is a little bit queer unless they’re proven to be straight. It’s a re-visioning of the world in which sexual variety is the norm — one part reflection of our actual experiences in queer subcultures, and one part wishful “what if…” thinking. Looking at my small repertoire of fic pairings, I’d argue I tend to choose characters who have the potential to — when queered in some way — disrupt the normative expectations about sex and relationships that we see in a lot of porn, erotica, and mainstream media — television shows, movies, etc., the original material from which fan fiction is born. Perhaps starting out as a critique of the original material, I often find my acts of fanfic subversion increases my pleasure as a consumer of the original material.

I enjoy writing stories about women unabashedly enjoying sex and knowing their bodies. I enjoy writing stories about elder folk, late-in-life lesbianism, about people having sex when their bodies don’t always work the way they want them to. I like writing fic in which it’s taken for granted (by me, the author, at least) that men can, and do, enjoy a full range of emotional intimacy, body insecurities, carry baggage from damaging relationships, enjoy sex that isn’t always fucking. (In fact, I have yet to write a fic that includes men having anal sex.) I like writing the vulnerability of desire, about what it means to expose to another person just how much you want, and (often even more frightening) what you want. I like writing sex that includes awkward conversations and misunderstandings and bodies that frustrate and fears that overwhelm — but that all ultimately circle around that moment of knowing and being known that can come when people get naked together, in every sense of the word.

The ethics of slash: a few final thoughts.Aside from the ethics of porn, which is a topic about which much ink (and internet bile) has been spilled, the ethics of fan fiction (or, more generally, “transformative works”) is itself a topic for discussion on the internet and beyond. Hanna and I belong to the Organization of Transformative Works, a non-profit organization that advocates for the practice of fan works and also runs the Archive of Our Own project, which seeks to collect and preserve fan works online. They publish a peer-reviewed journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, that explores fandom in its infinite varieties. So if you’re interest is piqued and you’d like to delve into the politics and culture of fan creation — or poke around and read some fic or whatever variety! — I really can’t recommend them highly enough.

What I wanted to do here is touch on a couple of ethical issues that have come up recently in conversation with friends — namely the ethics of “m/m erotica” written by women, and the practice of writing RPF or “real person” fic.

Can, or should, women write erotica about gay men?Periodically, there are internet-based wrangles over whether or not “m/m erotica” — which in the world of published romance/erotica generally means “gay porn for girls,” or (usually) women-authored fiction about gay male relationships marketed to a (presumed straight) female readership — is ethical (see for example here and here). The question is whether the m/m genre is exploitative, a hetero appropriation of gay male culture. The practice of writing erotic fan fiction is overwhelmingly a female one, and male/male pairings — as I write above — generate an incredible amount of enthusiasm, from both writers and readers (who appear to be, again, overwhelmingly female).

As an aside: fan-fiction writing as a feminized activity is something that deserves attention, and I have no doubt someone somewhere is doing incredible work on it. I think there’s a lot to explore in that dynamic — and I’m looking forward to being a part of the conversation, along with people who’ve done way more research than I into the phenomenon.

But back to the ethics of being a woman writing/reading porn involving men having sex with other men. Which is something I, a cis woman, do on a near-daily basis (see above). I admit that, when the articles about m/m erotica appeared, I did some soul-searching about it. When people suggest an activity might be exploitative it’s pretty much always a good idea to take their position seriously and listen to what they have to say. But. Here’s my thing about the case against m/m erotica: it basically comes down to an argument that if people of sexual identity A create or consume erotica about (fictional) people of sexual identity B, particularly if there’s a dynamic of social privilege in the mix, that’s per se a problem.

But sexual identity isn’t some sort of siloed, static thing — or at least I don’t experience it that way. Our sexual identities, desires, practices — they’re messy and complicated and shift over time. Preferred sex and/or gender of one’s actual partners aside, we can have fantasies and enjoy porn about practices we would never want to actually engage in. And, I would argue, we can find porn about bodies and practices we don’t per se find arousing, arousing because so much of sex isn’t the geometry of bodies coming together but (see post two) the narrative surrounding that context. Recent research is beginning to support this notion, particularly for female-bodied persons. As J. Jack Halberstam points out in the recent book Gaga Feminism (Beacon Press, 2012):

People are not asking why it is that gay men do not, generally speaking, produce any [sexual] fantasies around femininity, while lesbians produce lots of fantasy environments that include men or masculinity. When, in The Kids Are All Right, the lesbian couple watches gay male pornography to spice up their sex life, the scene was met with incredulity, especially from gay men. Indeed, a gay magazine journalist called me and asked me to comment on this bizarre (to him) scene. I responded that lots of lesbians watch and like gay male porn, straight male porn, and everything in between … [According to sexual response studies] while men, gay and straight, tend to respond in inflexible ways to erotic images of men and women (straight men want to see female bodies, gay men want to see male bodies), women, gay and straight, tend to respond in flexible ways to images of men, women, and animals. (p. 87-88).

So my point is that what sounds like a fairly reasonable call for non-appropriation (“what do these straight women think they’re doing, fantasizing about gay men!”) becomes tangled really quickly.

To use my own example: I’m a bisexual woman in a same-sex relationship with another woman. Does that mean I’m only “allowed” to be involved in reading/writing porn featuring two women? Are threesomes okay — or not, because I’m not in an open or poly relationship? If I write about sex involving male bodies, is it okay because as a bi woman I’m sexually attracted to men? But then it would be okay for straight women to write gay porn also, so maybe I’m only allowed to write porn about hetero pairings? But I’ve never been in a straight relationship, and identify as part of the queer community — so maybe that’s off-limits as well. But if I’m part of the queer community then we’re back where we started: maybe I get to create and consume porn about same-sex couples because I’m part of a same-sex couple?

So you end up on this merry-go-round of factors that could be used to determine who is or isn’t “qualified” or ethically able to create certain types of sexual fictions. And I think that that sort of policing ultimately impoverishes us all. If we started saying that straight people could only write or enjoy porn about straight folks, and gay men and lesbians could only write or enjoy porn about gay men and lesbians … not only would we miss out exploring the sexual diversity of humanity through the imaginative act of writing and reading, but we’d also be ignoring that there are people who don’t fit into these neat and tidy categories of the self.

I’m not saying there isn’t a place for critique. Hell, in my book, there’s nothing in the world so sacrosanct as to be beyond critique. And I absolutely believe that there is porn out there that fetishizes queerness for the straight gaze. I mean, I wouldn’t be writing porn in the first place if I hadn’t gotten frustrated with the conventions and stereotypes I saw being recapitulated over and over in the porn I was reading. So I think anyone involved in writing erotica should be open to conversation about their work, open to hearing people say, “Hey, that thing you did there in that story rubbed me the wrong way, and here’s why.” It’s not a requirement to engage, but I would hope the resulting conversation could be an opportunity for growth for all involved.

What are my feelings on “real person” erotic fan fiction?

Yup, it’s a thing in the world, people writing (often erotic) fan fiction featuring real-life celebrities. Often, though not always, these celebrities are the actors portraying the characters that these same authors write other fan fiction pieces about. But there are also people who write erotic fan fiction about politicians, musicians, and other people in the public eye.

I had a follower on Twitter ask me last week what I think about the practice:

@feministlib Must ask: do you have thoughts on RPF/RPS in contrast to general fanfic or slash fiction? Ethical/Moral/Creative boundaries?
— Jen Jurgens (@capricurgens) January 19, 2013

I responded:

@capricurgens thanks for asking! short answer is that I’m squicked out by RPF because it feels non-consensual and intrusive to me (1/2)
— feministlibrarian (@feministlib) January 19, 2013

And I’m not sure I have a whole lot more to add to this “short answer” response. Characters (whether portrayed by actors or written about in a text) are characters not human beings. We joke about how they take over our brains and insist their own version of events, but at the end of the day they are human creations — not humans themselves. They have no independent bodily autonomy or agency. They have no legal or social standing as persons. Real people do.

Real people can create erotica or pornography that involves themselves and offer it to others (friends or strangers) to enjoy consuming — as long as everyone’s staying safe and is able to consent without coercion I’m down with that. I even think teenagers technically under the age of consent should have the protected right to create erotica materials involving themselves and share those materials with their peers as part of their own sexual exploration. Obviously this raises questions about how to give them a safe space to explore their sexuality without being exploited, and I agree that’s a conversation to be had. But the general principle is: we should all have the creative license to explore our sexuality in textual and visual ways and share it as we desire.

However: consent is key here. I imagine human beings have always developed fantasies around other actual people prior to full and enthusiastic consent being given — in the case of those we later become sexually intimate with — or in situations where those relationships will never flower, but we’re crushing hard anyway. This isn’t about policing personal imagination — have all the damn fantasies you want about whomever and whatever you find turns you on.

I’d argue, though, that in the case of fantasies about real live actual people who aren’t involved in the spinning out of those fantasies? Those stories or images are best left in private spaces: your computer hard-drive, your journal, whatever. I’m not thinking so much of regulation here — I’m not arguing we pull RPF from the Archive and ban people from publishing more — but I’m arguing that as a matter of common courtesy it’s kinda, well, rude, to put your fantasies about actual people who you have no relationship with and who aren’t consenting to have these sexualized stories or images created around them out into the world of the ‘net where those same people could presumably come across said stories by Googling their names.

If someone wrote an erotica story — even a really sweet hot one! — about me as me and posted it online and I stumbled across it, it would feel really stalkery and invasive to me. Like, my wife is the only one at this point in time who has my permission to spin out stories about my bits that way.

So yes, I do think there are boundaries and ethical considerations where fan-creation is concerned. And I appreciate that there are people within fandom who are willing and interested in engaging in ongoing conversations about those difficult aspects of the genre. What I do hope is that those outside of the genre will think twice before dismissing the practice wholesale as facile or perverted (in the not-cool way). Because I think fan engagement with (mainstream) creative works has a lot of potential to change and complicate the (mainstream) conversation about human sexuality.

*One of the pieces of fan fiction I’m most proud of is a Donna Noble/Idris fic completed for last year’s International Day of Femslash.

I’ve been letting this sit in my drafts folder for a couple of days and I’m starting to feel the weight of perfection closing in … so quickly, quickly! I’m going to try and get these ideas out there before I’m crushed by the tyranny of Unfinished Thoughts.

Why write erotic fan fiction?

Why erotic fan fiction indeed.

So a couple of things.

Building on what I wrote in response to the question “why fan fiction,” thinking about the lives of characters “off screen” (or after the novel or series is done) can often translate into imagining the playing-out of relationships that were established in canon. Not only do many mainstream novels (not just the ones for children and young adults) fade to black around sexual encounters, they often skirt the whole question entirely by ending the story arc with the get-together moment, or at least the early days of the relationship. Inquiring minds want to know what happens after — and once you get to beyond a certain age, it seems pretty clear that sexual intimacy is often (though obviously not always) a part of the “after.” It’s long been a habit of the heart, for me, to extend the existence of fictional characters to give them the relationships and experiences the main narrative only gestures toward.

Too, when I was re-introduced to the concept of fan-created fiction and other fan works, it was as a genre that focused heavily on “slash,” or fan work where characters’ sexual relationships (whether canon or not) were the central theme.If your only encounter with fan works is through reading about 50 Shades of Gray or the resulting mainstream news coverage of fan fiction as a phenomenon, you can be forgiven in assuming that all fan fiction is erotic. It’s not. I’m not sufficiently expert in the field to say what percentage of fan work is, in part or primarily, erotic (I’d guess a substantial proportion, but that’s also what I tend to go looking for so my sample is extremely biased), but erotica is not the only direction fan work can take. Yet it was a key factor in what drew me, as an adult, back into the practice of fan writing.

I read it exclusively, for awhile, but eventually I started looking for pairings and stories that I couldn’t find anywhere (more on that in part three) … in other words, I found a gap in the literature! And like any nerdy academic, once I’d found the gap(s) people weren’t exploring I determined to explore them. So pretty soon, I started writing, and people started reading, and people by their own account enjoyed what they read, and who doesn’t like positive reinforcement?!

You could also ask the question this way: Why write erotic fan fiction?

I find erotica in general a compelling genre, and one — as I’ve written before — that has a great deal of (often underestimated) potential to help us explore meaningful aspects of the human condition. But I often find erotic fiction of the non-fannish variety incredibly hit-or-miss. As a member of my writing group and I were bemoaning the other day, it’s often the case that you pick up an anthology of Best Lesbian Erotica or Best Erotic Romance or even the more theme-driven works (steampunk, quickies, food porn, BDSM, etc.) and at the most you find two or three stories out of twenty that dampen the knickers.

I always thought, you know, “different strokes for different folks” (in this case, ahem, quite literally), but then I discovered erotic fan fiction? Maybe it was just that I happened to re-acquaint myself with the genre at a time when I was ready to start thinking about sexual narratives in a more sustained way. Maybe it was because I was exploring my own sexual potential in concrete ways, and thus sexual knowledge, both fictive and non, were suddenly ever more compelling. This is part of the equation, surely. Fan fiction — the writing and the reading, the community sharing — has become entangled in my learnings and conversations about sexuality more generally and how we human beings narrate desire.

But as I’ve been turning this question over in my head the last couple of days, I think there’s actually another more … technical? … reason why fan fiction erotica has a higher success rate for me (in terms of capturing my interest as a creator and consumer) than erotica in general. And the reason goes something like this: sex gains meaning through context. There are different schools of thought about what makes for effective porn, and some people will argue — or even just take as read — that effective porn is effective precisely because it’s non-contextual and non-specific. That the characters are effective primarily because they are utterly interchangeable. One of the arguments for why so few male performers emerge as stars in the mainstream porn business is precisely this: that the ideal (male) porn actor fades into the background, is unremarkable enough that the (presumed hetero male) viewer can effectively erase the actor from the scene and insert himself into the action. But for me, the exact opposite is true: the more particular and real the characters in a given story are, the more heartbreaking and hot the sex. Because I’ve been convinced I should care. Sex acts are weird and messy and frankly ridiculous … it’s we (participants and witnesses) who imbue the acts with meaning. (You’ll say there’s a physical component as well, and I’m not disputing that, but consider the difference between being someone biting your neck out of the blue and sucking a hickey into your shoulder in the midst of lovemaking … it’s context that makes the physical activity feel good, not the actions in and of themselves.)

Intimacy can be the work of a fleeting moment or happen in the context of a life-long relationship, but without context sex acts themselves are, well, boring (to me, at least).

Fan fiction evokes context. True, the best fan fiction can stand on its own and be enjoyed by readers who know virtually nothing about the canon narratives to which the fic refers. Case in point, when Hanna first started sharing fic with me she was largely sending me stories written for anime and gaming ‘verses I had no context for. And they were still compelling and hot. But I think there’s a way that even just knowing these stories tie into a larger narrative encourage us to build context and imbue a scene with meaning. We don’t have to know every detail of that context, just that there is one. We’re encouraged to see the characters not just as conduits for sexual satisfaction, but individuals with full lives and the weight of personal history which they bring to their (fictional) sexual encounters.

As someone who counted fictional characters as intimate friends from a very early age, I guess it’s not a big surprise to me that the act of participating (as a voyeur-reader, or as an author-creator) in the intimacy of fictional characters feels real and satisfying in a way that more conventional types of erotic creation/consumption have not, for me.

I also think the energy of the fan community feeds into this: virtually all of the fan writers creating smut in this context are also readers — we swap work, we are one anothers’ editors, we cheer on stories, we’re invested in the (fictional) relationships working, so perhaps there’s something in the very activity of co-creation that’s … erotic? It’s similar to the really good energy you get in a class where everything gels and a critical mass of professor and students are pushing one another toward mutual heightened understanding? The relationship isn’t just between the reader and the characters, but also the writer-reader and the reader-writer; even if fan fiction is penned (or typed) by a single author, there’s usually a whole network of fellow fans around that author who create context for the work itself. And I think somehow that gives the relationship(s) and sexual intimacies within the work a unique intensity of meaning.

Stay tuned for part three, where I muse more specifically about why I write the particular types of erotic fan-fiction I write…

This topic has been kicking around in the back of my mind for awhile, in nebulous form, and then in the past couple of weeks I’ve (coincidentally?) found myself engaged in discussing theories of fan fiction and erotica writing with several friends via email, as well as the wonderful women of my #firstthedraft writing group. With encouragement from #ftd, here are my thoughts in blog post form.

I actually think the question why I write erotic fan fiction has several layers, and I’m going to unpack them successively: why fan fiction, why erotic fan fiction, and why the specific fandoms and pairings that I’ve chosen write. I also want to emphasize, because this is the sort of thing — both in terms of fandom and in terms of porn/erotica — about which people have Big and Important Feelings, that I am speaking very much for myself here. This is a post (or, rather, a series of posts) about why I write the erotic fan fiction I write. I am not attempting to synthesize the phenomenon writ large or pass judgement about what are the Correct and Right ways to approach the activity. I’m only trying to respond to the question people have asked me in various ways: Why do you do this thing you do? What do you find enjoyable about it? Is there anything you find troubling about the practice?

For all of you who have asked those questions, I’d love to continue the conversation in comments — so please do participate if you feel so moved!

Note: It will be unsurprising to most of you that my thoughts are lengthy. So I’m breaking this post into three sections, the first of which is below. Parts two and three will be forthcoming and will be linked from this post as they go live.

Why write fan fiction?So I’ve only been consciously participating in online fan spaces and reading/writing fan fiction identified as such for about five years. However, retroactively I would argue that my present practice of fan fictionalizing is only the most recent manifestation of the way I have always, since early childhood, interacted with fictional narratives. Some of my earliest memories are from around the age of five or six spinning out stories about my favorite fictional characters — at that time stories like Little House in the Big Woods and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. My childhood psycho-temporal spaces felt … porous. My parents never judged us in our childhood practices blurring that line in our imaginative play. (This seems important, because I did know families where the children were schooled early and often on what was and was not “real” and judged harshly for flights of fancy.)

So I had an active imaginative (and often, with friends and siblings, collaboratively imaginative) inner life growing up. I put myself to sleep telling stories about “what happened after…” the end of my favorite books or series; my favorite characters became imaginary playmates; and in adolescence the nearest and dearest of those characters were part of my coming-of-age in intimate ways. They became active participants (as much as fictional characters can be) in my exploration of sexuality and relationships. I not only rehearsed the good and the bad (and the smutty) that actually appeared in the books that I read … but I spun out elaborate stories incorporating my nearest and dearest (fictional) friends, and myself, building relational networks, families, and developing (hypothetical) sexual intimacies in various ways. In retrospect, I think this alternate universe I inhabited in my head helped me process a lot of the new information I was taking in — physical changes, emotional upheavals, learnings about what it meant to be an adult in a variety of ways — without feeling overwhelmed.

Without boring you to tears giving the world-building details, the space I created was one where I could literally move back and forth from childhood and adulthood, exploring the confines and capabilities of each mode of being. Imaginatively living an adult life elsewhere helped me approach my teenage years as if I had the confidence and experience of an adult.

In addition to being useful psychically and emotionally for me, I think the spinning out of private fan-fiction-like scenarios fed my insatiable desire to know more: to know about character motivation, to know what happened next, to know what the characters were thinking and feeling about events that took place, to know what might happen if event X or conversation Y took place. There’s a great passage in one of E. Nesbit’s Treasure Seekers books where the narrator informs the reader that lots of everyday things have happened (like eating and sleeping and going to the toilet) that he hasn’t bothered to write down because those are all the boring bits that everyone does but no one wants to read about. Fiction necessarily revises for a tighter narrative, and things get left out. As a reader, I wanted them back in — so I put them there, and molded them to my own particular specifications.

In those years, I encountered both professional and amateur fan works (from my mother’s little stories about the Pevensie children that she penned for us at Christmastime to fan art to the Star Wars sequel novels to Neil Gaiman’s “The Problem of Susan”) but I wasn’t actively participating in fan communities. I had friends who did (for example, a friend who was active in an online forum for writing stories inspired by Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels) but didn’t hear a lot that drew me into active involvement. There was lots of interpersonal drama and litigation fears and, hey, I was already writing/imagining on my own so why bother with the added complication of other fans with their own vision and agenda?

But I got my fan community “reboot” (so to speak) when I met Hanna and she re-introduced me to the activities and pleasures of being a fan — and this time, being a fan as part of a wider network of fans enjoying the same work(s) of whatever medium. Obviously the Internet had come along in the meantime, and as I was already involved in the feminist blogosphere I had some sense of how online communities work and what their pleasures and pitfalls are. Over time, the language of fandom bled into the language of feminism and became part of my social experience, as feminism had, both on- and offline.

These days, I really enjoy the positive energy of the fan circles in which I run. I enjoy that fans feel license to take joyful pleasure in things and create works inspired by those things. I enjoy the way those creations are shared freely and embraced by the fellow creator-consumer audience. I enjoy the practices of “gifting” works and creating “inspired by” pieces which complement one another or build off another fan’s work. I like how the currency of fandom is mutual appreciation and celebration of amateur creation. (And simultaneously I’m much better able than I was as a teenager to ignore or minimize the drama and intensity which can overtake online communities of any kind. I’ve learned, in other words, when to close the internet browser and walk away!)

So I write fan fiction because I always have, and now know that this practice has a name! I write fan fiction because I’m always hungry to know more, and to make the fictional characters I love known to me in ways that go beyond the bounds of a single novel or series or television show or film. And I enjoy participating in such a positive, creative space that is outside of the economies of wage-work. I purposefully decided not to pursue a career as a writer in part because I wanted writing to be something that I could always come to voluntarily, without worrying whether or not I could pay rent. (I don’t think this is a better or purer way to approach writing than writing as a job — more power to those who do! It just wasn’t for me, and I appreciate that I can continue to write and find readers in this playful alternative space.)

So a while back, Hanna and I watched this Supernatural episode from season five called “The End” (5:04) which some of you may remember. The one in which asshole angel Zachariah tries to give Dean a kick in the pants by sending him into an alternate future wherein the shit has hit the fan due to Dean’s unwillingness to follow angelic plans. When present Dean encounters future Dean he has to convince his alternate self he is who he appears to be. And he does it like this:

Future!Dean: Okay. If you’re me, then tell me something only I would know.Dean: Rhonda Hurley. We were, uh, nineteen. She made us try on her panties. They were pink. And satiny. And you know what? We kind of liked it.Future!Dean: Touché.

In the days that followed, we had several versions of this conversation:

Anna: I really can’t believe that scene doesn’t turn up in fic more often, I mean it’s all right there really.Hanna: Yup. Right there.Anna: Like, how it would be something Dean was super secretive and embarrassed about and Cas would totally not understand why it was a source of embarrassment.Hanna: Yup.Anna: Someone totally needs to write that fic.Hanna: It’s all yours. Write away.

Title:We Both Kinda Liked ItAuthor: ElizaJaneFandom: SupernaturalPairings: Dean Winchester/Castiel, Dean Winchester/Rhonda HurleyRating: ExplicitLength: 13,514 words (8 chapters)Tags: Established Relationship, Past Relationship(s), Gender Policing, John Winchester is an asshole, Castiel goes clothes shopping, Dean is all right.Summary: You’re twenty-nine. He reminds himself. And Dad’s not here to shout or throw things or give you the fucking silent treatment. And the only other people in the hotel room are his boyfriend-the-fallen-angel and his brother the gayest straight boy that ever lived.

“For the people who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they’ll like.” If this is your sort of thing, hop on over and check it out.

In my circle of fannish friends we’ve been struck lately by the humorous and occasionally horrifying effects of going through your media-consuming life with fan and/or slash goggles welded to your face.

… disappointed me mightily last weekend because when I first glanced at it, I thought someone was suggesting there be some sort of Inspector Lewis/Avengers crossover. And then I was like OH ANNE HATHAWAY. RIGHT.

For a minute I was baffled as to why the latest season of Doctor Who involved Eleven saving the day in Cambodia … not that I would mind, but it would have been a significant shift from its Euro-centric plotlines!

text: Nerdy Feminist blog post titled “The ‘Tosh Sucks’ Roundup”

And because I had no idea who Daniel Tosh was before the recent dust-up, I was saddened by the thought that somewhere, a bunch of people cared enough about hating Toshiko Sato that they were writing multiple blog posts about it. Thankfully — wrong Tosh!

Sometimes, when the real news gets you down, you find yourself wishing the fan-goggle versions were for true! Because of reasons.

Thank goodness it’s Friday, everyone, and I hope you have some rest & relaxation time ahead of you.